Five

Hannah

That first day of school, Hannah tried not to obsess about her son or her lack of regular work and failed at both. She sent out exploratory emails to contacts at other pharma companies and messaged former clients letting them know she was available. Ben would certainly follow up on that meeting about his client, but she didn’t want to pressure him. Then, she settled down at her kitchen table to focus on finishing her final edit of a history professor’s essays about his time in the Peace Corps so she could bill him as soon as possible. But oh, how she’d hated this project. She’d run out of constructive ways to tell him how to make a sentence come alive. Write better! she’d wanted to scream.

The final proofread was endless and tedious, and she was constantly interrupted with thoughts of her son and the realization that her jaw was tense, her neck, her breathing shallow. She kept getting up to pace and refill her water glass and eat half a banana and then, ten minutes later, the other half.

Drop-off at school had gone smoothly, but she kept picturing all the boys lingering outside on the grass, bent over their phones. A variety of sizes, the way boys were at this age. Some as tall and muscled as men, the others half their height and weight. Miles had agreed to be driven to school but insisted on taking the bus home, because Morgan had told him that Hillary was wrong—lots of the boys rode the bus home but the girls not so much. Dirty, smelly, what? She wondered why, but he wanted to belong, so Hannah didn’t question it. One day. One bus ride home. We will see how it goes, she’d thought as she dropped him off and drove through the winding path through campus. With fifteen hundred students, the buildings were sprawling and multistoried, with a pool, sports complex, and climbing wall. The scale of the campus alone would certainly worry some parents. But Miles liked to explore and had a great sense of direction, like his dad. Once, when he was six, he’d wandered from their campsite and gotten lost for almost an hour, the worst hour of Hannah’s life. Mike kept saying that Miles would know to follow the river back. And sure enough, that was exactly what had happened. Mike had been proud: a free-range, capable kid who could navigate the outdoors.

Then she got home and couldn’t stop thinking about all those new boys. Would Miles get lost not on the grounds but in the personalities, the types? Were they friendly? Were they cruel? Or were they that confusing in-between, like girls could be? She shuddered to consider what they were looking at on their phones. Porn? Other kids in this neighborhood got phones at ten, eleven, twelve, she knew. Because Miles didn’t go to sports practices or after-school activities, because he had access to some video games and her iPad and computer in a limited way, she’d always thought thirteen, which was a few months away, but didn’t want him to feel left out. Was she an overprotective, idealistic, screen-time-nagging idiot? Should she have gotten him a phone even though he didn’t need it and it would ruin his brain?

Hannah stood up to drink her third glass of water and eat another handful of cashews from her stash in the cupboard, and almost as quickly as the thoughts came to her, guilt washed over her, too. That little girl across the street, Liza Harris, was still missing, and she, Hannah, knew exactly where her son was. She’d been more calm walking through the woods with her mother and sister than she was waiting here, safe in her kitchen, thinking of Miles at school. Jesus, what was wrong with her?

She came back to her computer, but the alien sound of a helicopter overhead rattled the windows, startled her. The family had suspended the volunteer search across the wooded paths and short brush throughout the hills of their neighborhood, but helicopters, here, in the suburbs? Had they paid for these, or the police? There were dense, sloping stands of trees ringing the neighborhood, separating it from the old Tamsen farm. Woods too thick for ordinary volunteers. Did they know something was down there? Or were they just too lazy to search?

The next one swooped loud and low to the east, too close. Was it over Hillary’s house?

She stood up to look out the kitchen window when a sharp knock on the front door shook the floorboards. The house was old, but at that moment, it felt downright flimsy, like it couldn’t hold her.

Two men stood on her porch, looking around in a way that reminded her of home buyers, surveying the land, construction, looking for peeling paint. They were about the same age, both with brown hair, but one was sturdy and muscular, the other taller, lanky, a little gray in the front of his hair. Their rayon pants and button-down shirts made her think they were with a church group. She sighed deeply and prepared her standard line about being on deadline and wondered if they’d say that deadlines wouldn’t matter when the rapture came. She’d heard that one before. But as she approached the door, they both held up badges to the windowpane.

Again, guilt flooded her chest. How could she keep forgetting what was going on around her? That’s what being a writer will do to you, she thought. A deep dive that can carry you away from almost anything on the surface, even someone’s darkest tragedy.

“Afternoon,” the shorter one said. “We’re canvassing all the neighbors about the Liza Harris case.”

“Of course,” Hannah said and invited them in. They introduced themselves as Detectives Carelli and Thompson. Up close, she could see more differences in their hair, skin, faces. Carelli, the shorter one, was tan and dark-eyed. Thompson was pale, and his eyes were hazel. The sprout of gray in his cowlick threw a little bit of light in his serious face, but not much. He would have been handsome, perhaps, if he smiled or got some sun on his face. Neither of them smiled, so she didn’t either.

They looked around at a few remaining boxes and not-hung pictures.

“Just moved in,” Thompson said.

Not a question, but she answered by nodding.

“Where’s your son today?”

“He’s at school.” She frowned. “Wait, how—”

“You look a bit like your sister. I bet you get that a lot.”

She blinked. “No, actually. Not anymore.”

They asked her when she had arrived, if she’d noticed anything amiss. On moving day or before. No. Did she ever walk on the trails through the woods. No. Not yet. Anything she could think of that she’d observed across the street? Even the smallest detail that might have meaning? From any time?

“There were balloons,” she said dumbly.

“Balloons?”

“Tied to the mailbox. The day of my walk-through on the house.”

“For a party.”

“Yes, I assume. But—”

“But what?”

“There were no cars.”

“I’m sorry, no cars?” Thompson’s neutral face had moved into a full frown. He was older than she’d originally estimated.

“I was here most of the evening, here and at my sister’s. And there were no cars for the party. I left around seven, seven thirty.”

“Maybe the party was later?”

“For a six-year-old? Doubtful,” she said.

“And this struck you as odd.”

“Just this moment,” she said. “I’m realizing this right now.”

“Okay. Well, maybe the party was the day before.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “The balloons hadn’t lost air. They were fresh balloons, not limp like they are the next day.”

The two men blinked at her, sizing her up.

“It’s a mom thing,” she said dumbly, but it was true, and they nodded. “So maybe no one came to her party,” she continued. “Which would be traumatizing.”

She could have kept going on this topic, shared the stories of moms on social media who railed against kids who RSVPed yes and then didn’t show. They posted photos with the birthday boy alone in a party hat, and strangers made it go viral, sending cards and presents and prayers to this poor lonely kid. It happened. She could certainly imagine that little girl having her heart broken, running into the woods in tears, too broken up to notice she’d wandered into something dangerous.

But their blank expressions told her to stop. They either cared or didn’t care, but at least she had come up with something to tell them. She was proud of her powers of observation, even if they weren’t. They asked her what day this was, if she was certain it was Wednesday, and she looked in her phone and told them. A Wednesday, yes.

She offered them coffee or tea, gesturing toward the kitchen.

“How about a glass of water?” Carelli said.

“Yes. Of course. Water.”

She poured from a Brita in the fridge. They thanked her and raised their glasses as if toasting her new home.

“Nostrovia,” she said, then instantly regretted it. Why she’d done that, she couldn’t say. Would they ascribe meaning to that? Would they walk away thinking she wasn’t a teetotaler but a Russian alcoholic who drank vodka on a Tuesday?

“So your son,” the taller one said slowly, setting his glass down on the narrow dining-room table, drawing out the pause as if she might fill in the blank, blurt something out. He swallowed and frowned, considering his next words—or hers. But she waited, raising her eyes in anticipation.

“He’s coming home on the bus, is that right?”

She was annoyed they knew this but quickly realized they had probably just assumed. Since she clearly wasn’t leaving to pick him up and was here, working.

“Yes.”

“He was with you this weekend?”

“Yes.”

“Not with his father, here?”

Now it was her turn to take a deep breath. What the hell had Hillary told them? That she was divorced, that she had a kid, what else? They’d obviously interviewed her sister earlier, and she felt once again the second born’s annoyance. The older sister always went first, always had power over her. Could she have given her a few minutes’ heads-up, at least?

“Yes.”

“He didn’t leave for any sports practice or go to a friend’s house?”

“No.”

“No hikes in the woods?”

“No,” she said firmly, her face reddening. Jesus, they had a lot of nerve!

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. We were unpacking, not…perambulating.”

They exchanged a glance.

“It means strolling,” she said quietly.

“We know what it means,” Thompson said.

“I have a lot of work to do,” she said. Which was exactly what she would have said to the Jehovah’s Witnesses or to the kid from the Clean Air Committee or anyone else who’d knocked at her door. She told herself she was not being uncooperative, just practical.

“Before he gets home,” Carelli said.

“What?”

“You want to finish your work before your son gets home.”

“Yes, yes I do.”

They finished their water and took a final sweep of her living room.

“Do your bedrooms face west or…south or north?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your bedrooms. Are the windows only to the west? Or is there a corner window? Just so we understand the configuration here,” Carelli said.

She blinked.

“Configuration means the layout of the house,” Thompson said, barely containing the smallest smile.

“We just moved in,” she said, setting down her glass. “All we’ve seen were some balloons. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m on deadline.”

“Journalist?”

“Depends on the day.”

“Gig economy, amirite?” Carelli said.

Ah, an attempt to cozy up to her, understand her predicament. If it had come from a person at a coffee shop or bus stop, it would have meant one thing: commiseration. But what did it mean coming from a cop? That she was underpaid, desperate? That some days she would do anything for money?

She forced her lips into a weak smile that she hoped made her look friendly enough but not desperate. And not stupid, not lonely, not any of the things that would make a divorced woman confide in a cop about her financial instability.

They walked to the front door, and she stood back, watching them open it and step onto the porch.

Thompson looked at her through the screen, cocked his head.

“Just to be clear,” he said, “the Harris family didn’t come over and welcome you to the neighborhood? The little girl didn’t run over to see if someone her age moved in?”

“No,” she said.

“What about the other neighbors? Anyone bring cookies or—”

“No.”

“Wow,” Carelli said. “Not very friendly.”

“Or maybe they’re all on deadline,” Thompson said.

They gave her a business card and said to call if she remembered anything else, even small, like the balloons, and she nodded. She stood at the door and made sure their car turned around and drove away, made sure they didn’t wait to see her son. They’d probably started at the top of the street and worked their way down. There was only one more property below her, before the main road. She hadn’t met that family yet, but Hannah had said they were quiet and kept to themselves. Which was exactly what everyone in the world said when their neighbor went to prison. Go talk to them, she thought. Go have a drink of water with the quiet people, not here with the loud, angry, busy people.

It was only when she sat back down at her computer that she found even more sting in what they’d said. Did they think she was faking being on deadline? Did they think she was an idiot for mentioning the balloons?

Or did they merely want to rub it in that dozens of people had seen a moving truck unloading and hadn’t bothered to come up and say hello to her and her son?

She thought of her old neighborhood in Narberth, twenty minutes away, but it couldn’t have been more different. The parade of neighbors the day they’d moved in. Casseroles, bottles of wine, cookies. She thought of how close the school had been, how the kids walked there in clusters. Now she’d moved to a place where the kids ghosted another kid on her birthday. And no one welcomed the new kid either. The crimes against kids were adding up daily.

As she settled down to work, she remembered, suddenly, sharply, that Miles had gone outside the night they’d moved in, walked down to look at the swollen creek. He’d been gone, what, five minutes? Seven? But that could hardly be called a walk. That was more of a glance. And it was Friday, not Saturday. They wanted to know about Saturday. She continued working for an hour or more and then looked at her watch.

The bus was late. One day, and their little system was already unreliable.